How Wendi Deng found her mojo

Last January, Amy Chua got an unexpected email just before an excerpt from her provocative child-rearing manual, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, appeared in The Wall Street Journal. It was from Wendi Deng Murdoch, the wife of Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp owns the Journal.

“She wanted her daughters to come to New Haven and meet my daughters,” Chua said in a phone interview. Like the Murdoch girls, Chua’s daughters are fluent in Chinese and English and have a Chinese mother who grew up with a mother of her own who was unimaginably strict by Western standards.

“She was asking for advice like, ‘How do you get a child to practise piano for more than one hour a day?’ ” Chua recalled of their first meeting. “She parents almost identically to the way I do.”

In return for Chua’s parenting tips, Murdoch gave the author some advice. After the excerpt ran in the Journal, Chua found herself the subject of an angry backlash on mommy blogs, morning TV and newspaper columns. A lot of friends tried to console Chua, but Murdoch was different.

“She was like: ‘Why do you care what people think? You have two wonderful daughters. Get over it’, ” Chua recalled.

If anyone is qualified to give advice on developing a thick skin, it’s Wendi Deng Murdoch, 43, who harbours an ambition and busyness that would most likely exhaust even the most determined of Manhattan socialites.

Since the couple wed in 1999, Murdoch, the third wife of Rupert Murdoch and 38 years his junior, has been viewed with suspicion and scepticism. At best, she was described as a “trophy wife” and at worse a “gold digger”.

Lately, the intricate narrative of how Deng Wen Di from Jiangsu province in eastern China became Wendi Murdoch of the Rockefeller triplex on Fifth Avenue (and other homes in Beverly Hills and Carmel, California; London; Cavan, South Australia; and Beijing) has taken another turn.

Even as her husband’s company, News Corp, faces scrutiny over a phone hacking scandal at its British newspapers, Murdoch has emerged with her own independent career and has immersed herself in a social circle that includes David Geffen, Larry Ellison, Tony Blair, Nicole Kidman and Bono – one that is often free of her husband’s presence.

Her first film, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, based on the best-selling book and produced with Florence Sloan, the Chinese wife of another media mogul, the former MGM studio chief Harry Sloan, came out in 2011. The pair are close to signing a deal with Sony Pictures to distribute their second movie based on the memoir Journey of a Thousand Miles, by Chinese pianist Lang Lang.

Through a family spokesman, Murdoch declined to be interviewed for this article, as did other members of the Murdoch family. But many of her friends were willing to discuss Murdoch’s new and, they say, more accurate public persona.

They describe someone who is, above almost all things, a world-class networker, collecting powerful friends and brokering connections. She hosts annual dinner parties with powerful women, hosts book parties for friends and regularly holds get-togethers. When Tony and Cherie Blair visited Beijing in 2009, Murdoch organised a dinner party with Chinese powerbrokers. (Cherie Blair is now among those suing News Corp’s British newspaper unit in the phone hacking scandal.)

In May 2011, when Hugh Jackman, a close friend who made a cameo in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, was in early performances of his one-man show in San Francisco, the project was largely a low-profile one. Until Murdoch got involved.

“As a surprise Wendi flew in with about a dozen of the most influential people in the business,” Jackman wrote in an email. “She is the best publicist anyone could ever have.” The show later moved to Broadway.

If there was a single moment that crystallised Murdoch’s ascendancy in the public imagination, it was during her husband’s testimony last July before a British parliamentary subcommittee over the widespread phone hacking that happened at one of his newspapers, News of the World. Wearing a pink blazer, she sat behind him, then instinctively vaulted out of her chair to protect her husband from a protester’s pie attack.

“Until the cream-pie incident, she’d really been branded the classic younger wife with a tinge of racism and stereotyping,” said Andrew Butcher, a former senior communications executive at News Corp. “That turned everything around for her. It seemed to finally give the marriage legitimacy,” he added.

Friends said they were not surprised at all to see Murdoch, a former competitive volleyball player, jump to her husband’s defence.

“Nothing characterises her more than that moment,” said Diane von Furstenberg, a long-time friend whose husband, Barry Diller, worked for Rupert Murdoch. “She is protective and fierce and not afraid of anything.”

Sally Shan, a managing director of HarbourVest Partners, a global private equity firm, and Murdoch’s room-mate when they attended the Yale School of Management, said, “I saw that and thought, that’s my Wendi.”

If Wendi Deng Murdoch had not married the world’s most powerful media mogul, her life would probably read like an idealised version of the American immigrant story.

The third daughter of a Guangzhou factory director moves to the US and gets a job at the Sichuan Garden in Westwood, California, for $20 a day and all the leftover soup she can eat. She takes night classes at a commuter college, gets accepted by an Ivy League school, enters the media business and eventually finds herself walking red carpets and holding dinner parties at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But this is no typical immigrant tale.

After Liz Smith announced in the New York Post in 1998 that Rupert Murdoch and his wife of 31 years, Anna, had amicably separated, the company crafted a widely accepted narrative that Murdoch and Wendi Deng met later, after he and Anna were already separated, when Deng accompanied Rupert Murdoch on a trip to Beijing.

In reality, they met months earlier during a town-hall-style session at Star TV, according to a person who was close to Rupert Murdoch at the time. Employees, gathered in the company’s glistening new Kowloon headquarters in Hong Kong, lobbed mostly softball questions at Rupert Murdoch. Then Deng stood up.

“Why is your China strategy so bad?” she asked Rupert Murdoch in her fractured English, according to a person close to News Corp who attended the meeting. Unsatisfied with his answer, she approached him after the meeting, and they discussed media and China and business, all things that, coming from a younger, attractive woman, apparently proved an aphrodisiac to Rupert Murdoch.

He had been taken aback at how direct Deng was (friends say she still has almost no brain-to-mouth filter) and how much she enjoyed talking business, according to people close to the couple.

In 1999, 82 guests watched as the couple wed on board Rupert Murdoch’s 155-foot yacht, the Morning Glory, in New York Harbour. In the early days of marriage, much was made of Rupert Murdoch’s transformation: his shoddy hair-dye job, Prada suits, fitness regimen and new SoHo loft. But less noted was the transformation happening to his wife. Wendi Murdoch’s friends like to talk about how the money has not fundamentally changed the brash, unfiltered, funny woman Rupert Murdoch first met in Kowloon. But in other ways, his billions have significantly transformed her.

She used to wash her clothes and face with the same soap, said a 2008 Vogue article, and seldom wore make-up, much less luxuriated in the perks of privilege – like the private yoga classes with her friends Kathy Freston and Arianna Huffington – she indulges in today. At Yale, she would stake out bargain clothes store Filene’s Basement to procure designer gowns on the cheap. Today, she is regularly photographed wearing Rodarte and Prada.

Wendi Murdoch quickly and giddily embraced the trappings of great wealth. While her husband conducted business in various European capitals, she would travel with him and shop for glassware and cutlery and curtains to stock her new homes. In addition to their loft in SoHo, the Murdochs transformed an old hutong in Beijing into a courtyard oasis decorated with art by Chinese artists.

At the same time, she tried to find a place for herself in the family business, brokering meetings in China and weighing in on MySpace’s Chinese operations. As head of Star TV, James Murdoch worked with his stepmother to try to repair News Corp’s standing in China. In turn, Wendi Murdoch earned James’s respect, and he became the first of Rupert Murdoch’s four grown children to accept his father’s third marriage, according to a person close to the Murdoch family.

Still, there were bumps. The first came in 2000, when The Wall Street Journal, not yet owned by News Corp, published a 4000-word front-page article about her. It described how, in 1988 at age 19, she had moved to Los Angeles with a married couple, Jake and Joyce Cherry, to learn English. Jake Cherry and Wendi Deng had an affair, according to the article, and she married him in 1990. The marriage lasted two years and seven months, according to Los Angeles court records. In that time, she got a green card and enrolled at California State University.

Rupert Murdoch was furious, according to people close to News Corp who would not discuss the article on the record, even though it was the kind of article he would have loved – had it been in one of his newspapers and about someone else’s third wife. The article and subsequent follow-ups by other publications branded Wendi Murdoch as a calculating seductress for much of the next decade.

Then in 2006, there was an infamous marital battle when Rupert Murdoch declared in a TV interview with journalist Charlie Rose that while Grace and Chloe, his daughters with Wendi, would have an equal economic interest in the family’s trust, they would not have the same voting rights as his children from his previous marriages, Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James.

Wendi Murdoch was enraged. It was the first she had heard of that decision.

“He became this typical husband whose wife threatened to leave him,” said a person close to News Corp who would not speak for attribution about the Murdochs’ relationship. “It was surreal.”

They worked through it, and by all accounts, Wendi has had a hugely positive impact on Rupert. She will openly roll her eyes at him when he’s out of line and tell him when he’s wrong, even while the two are in public.

“She has a great upbeat personality and is one of the few people who can keep Rupert Murdoch under control,” said Butcher, the former News Corp spokesman. “In the very early days of the marriage she was somewhat subordinate, but that pretty quickly changed.”

As their daughters, Grace, 10, and Chloe, 8 (whom Wendi Murdoch refers to as “Grace Chloe” in her still-heavily accented English) get older, she has taken on a wide range of professional endeavours, including the film business.

Wendi Murdoch was actively involved in the production of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and according to all accounts she thoroughly enjoyed her autonomy and power. At one point she stood up in a boardroom full of China’s most powerful film executives and demanded that the posters for the film be better positioned around Shanghai and that more money be spent on marketing.

“They all just got quiet and took it in,” said Wayne Wang, the film’s director. “The next day I started to see posters on the streets and buses that were the way she wanted them.”

Even as she forges her own identity, Rupert Murdoch’s influence is never far. Snow Flower was released domestically by News Corp’s Fox Searchlight in July 2011 just as revelations surfaced that News of the World had hacked into the voice mail of Milly Dowler, the teenager who had been kidnapped and murdered. The film grossed only about $11 million worldwide.

In recent months, as James Murdoch continues to face scrutiny about his involvement in the scandal in Britain and has resigned several key positions in the Murdoch empire, investors have questioned the future leadership of News Corp. In only the most hushed and off-the-record conversations do people close to the company ask: could Wendi take over one day?

Doubtful. In contrast to Anna Murdoch, who had an office on News Corp’s corporate floor and a position on the board until 1998, when Rupert Murdoch forced her off, the third Mrs Murdoch is kept at a distance.

“I’d say she actively does not want a role in the company,” said Geffen, a long-time friend. “Nor does she have an ambition to have her kids involved in the company.”

Wendi Murdoch was an early investor in Art.sy, an online start-up designed to help art enthusiasts browse works from galleries, museums and private collections. Early on, the website was having difficulty convincing gallery owners and artists to agree to allow it to display their art online.

Wendi Murdoch brought on her friend Dasha Zhukova, the Russian socialite and wife of billionaire Roman Abramovich. The two women hosted parties in Miami’s Art Basel to help introduce the Art.sy founder, Carter Cleveland, to Larry Gagosian and Marc Glimcher, among other key players gathered for the art fair.

“Here I was a 24-year-old nerdy computer science major, and I was going from booth to booth with Dasha and Wendi,” Cleveland said.

Wendi Murdoch initially found out about Art.sy the way wealthy and well-connected people hear about potential investments: through a friend. The friend was Joshua Kushner, who runs the private equity firm Thrive Capital and whose sister-in-law, Ivanka Trump, is a close friend of Wendi Murdoch’s.

In recent months, the Murdochs have grown to live largely separate lives, with Wendi Murdoch taking the girls to piano lessons and attending red-carpet galas, and Rupert Murdoch dealing with the scandal unfolding in Britain. As Wendi Murdoch attended the Oscars in February, Rupert Murdoch travelled to London to visit the newsroom of the embattled Sun tabloid, which has been accused of widespread bribery to a network of corrupt officials.

He rarely accompanies her to the many charitable events and parties she attends, partly because he is 81 and partly to avoid the news media, said several people close to the couple who did not want to discuss the pair’s marital relations on the record. (This week, the couple are holidaying in Venice after attending News Corp meetings in Rome and Milan.)

It has not been entirely easy for Wendi Murdoch to feel comfortable around the company she now keeps.

“I’ve seen her evolve over time in terms of her capacity to handle meeting people in the industry and senior government officials,” said Shan, her graduate school room-mate. “Initially that wasn’t her comfort zone.”

Wendi Murdoch still regularly (and humorously) drops references to how far she has come since her meagre childhood in China.

Like last year when she and Huffington hosted a party at Huffington’s Manhattan apartment to celebrate Freston’s newest weight-loss book, The Lean. Guests included Martha Stewart, Joel Klein and Harvey Weinstein. Because Freston is a vegan, the caterers had assembled a meatless spread with tofu, quinoa and kale spun into elaborate hors d’oeuvres.

Huffington recalled a toast Wendi Murdoch gave.

“She said, ‘I grew up so poor in China that one day I aspired to have meat regularly’,” Huffington said. “ ‘Now that I can have meat three times a day, Kathy tells us we can’t have any meat at all.’ ”